Philip Giraldi has a new “Deep Background” just out for the American Conservative magazine about former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s new job lobbying for Turkey – from which he has been credibly accused in the past of accepting cash bribes while still in the congress.
Month: April 2009
Journo Deemed A U.S. Terror Threat
Apparently, the pen is so mighty, that we can’t even risk certain foreign journalists flying in our airspace.
According to reports over the weekend, an Air France flight to Mexico was diverted because of one passenger, Franco-Colombian writer Hernando Calvo Ospina, who works for the Le Monde Diplomatique, a left-wing French-based newspaper. Apparently, Ospina has written extensive critiques of the current Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and the U.S.-fed drug war in Latin America. According to his publisher, he was on his way to Nicaragua, to research his current project, a book about the Central Intelligence Agency.
A spokesman for Mr Ospina’s French publisher, Le Temps des Cerises, said: “Hernando, who was heading to Nicaragua to research a report, thus found out that he is on a ‘no-fly list’ that bans a number of people from flying to or even over the United States.” (snip)
The publisher accused the Central Intelligence Agency of being behind Mr Ospina’s blacklisting, pointing out that the journalist was currently researching a book about the spy agency. “It shows to what degree its paranoia (has reached),” it said.
Air France said that as the flight was not due to stop in a US airport, it had not sent US authorities the passenger manifest. However, it sent one to Mexico, which apparently sent the list on. The crew were informed of the ban as they approached US airspace.
Mr Ospina, who has written several books and contributes to Le Monde Diplomatique, the left-wing French political monthly, said that he was informed of the order to divert the flight by its co-pilot.
“I was speechless and my first reaction was to ask, ‘Do you think I’m a terrorist?’,” he said. “He replied ‘no’ and said that was why he told me about it, adding that it was extraordinary and the first time it had happened on an Air France plane.”
Due to the secrecy of the Department of Homeland Security’s “no-fly list,” no one really knows how many names are on it, or who. Fliers snagged up in the list have limited recourse for appealing their situation under current laws. Legislation has been introduced in Congress — but so far not moved – to make the process more transparent.
According to reports and public statements, there are approximately 400,000 unique individuals on the FBI’s consolidated terror watch list, and more than one million names. In October 2008, then-DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters there were 2,500 individuals on the no-fly list and 16,000 on the “selectee list,” which directs airlines to send someone to secondary screening at airport checkpoints.
Obama’s Double Standard on Atrocities & Evil
At a Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Capitol on Thursday, President Obama called for “fighting the silence that is evil’s greatest co-conspirator.”
On the same day, Obama decided to oppose creation of a truth commission to vigorously investigate and expose U.S. torture crimes.
This is another of those damn paradoxes of which Washington is full of.
Perhaps Obama believes that any atrocity with less than a million victims is merely a technical error.
Condemning a genocide committed by a foreign government cannot redeem Obama if he effectively pardons U.S. government officials guilty of barbaric practices.
Obama could reverse his opposition to a full disclosure. Or, perhaps more likely, the surge of events and the information already pried out of the government will create enough momentum that far more facts will become public.
Oh, Poor Judge Bybee!
Pravda reports that Federal Judge Jay Bybee, who “interpreted” the law to mean that it was perfectly okay for George W. Bush to slam people against the wall 30 times in a row after keeping them awake for a month chained to the ceiling and forced to evacuate on themselves when they weren’t being locked in tiny little boxes or drowned almost to death over and over again, feels really, really bad about it! He was under a lot of time pressure!
That’s right. Bybee now says he “regrets that the memo was misused,” and that “the spirit of liberty has left the republic.”
Well, let’s just hope that when this most guilty of law-breaking felons finally dies in prison (if not the Salt-Pit torture dungeon outside of Kabul), someone will make sure to etch on his gravestone that “Here Lies the Man Who Tortured and Murdered the Spirit of Liberty in the Republic.”
Oh, who am I kidding? For him to go to jail would require the spirit of liberty in the republic he killed. It’s too late. There is no law.
And another thing: None of this is hyperbole. Jay Bybee is a criminal. He is a disgrace to mankind. These are just plain facts. No proud, red-blooded American should be too shy to say so. The fact that he’s sending his friends out to say boo hoo for him now means absolutely nothing. Plenty of convicted murderers and torturers claim they regret it. Find Jesus and everything. The only difference between them and him is that he’s a government employee. That’s all. See? No law. Just will. And torture.
The Paradox of Law: The Past as Prologue
by Mario Rizzo
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As an economist who has specialized in the economic analysis of law, I am quite frustrated by the statements of some commentators that the Obama Administration and the Congress should not look backwards in trying to uncover and/or prosecute member of the Bush Administration who may have been guilty of illegal actions, war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of the Geneva Conventions and so forth.
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In a sense, the prosecution of any alleged criminal is pointless. The act is done – the past is irrevocable – so why not just look to the future and not let it happen again?
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Life is not like that. The law looks backwards so that it won’t happen again – or, at least, that the chances that it will happen again are reduced. To wax philosophical for a moment: We live in time and there is continuity between the past, present and future.
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With all of the advantages of power – especially secrecy – what are the incentives to keep the State in line? We have laws and treaty obligations. When they are violated, is it enough that those guilty merely be subject to public disapproval? We cannot vote Bush out of office. We cannot now impeach him. We cannot convict him in a trial before the Senate. Any Administration can avoid all of these things by keeping things covered up until they are out of office. So the incentive to secrecy is great. The power is there to accomplish it. So the “political system†can be prevented from doing its job of disciplining office holders.
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So now what? If the Constitution and our laws have worth beyond the papers they are written on, there must be consequences. There must be investigations and prosecutions if warranted. There is no other option that can make the system honest.
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People will say that there have been worse crimes than possibly approving torture, illegal wiretapping, etc. For example, there was the fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War – an act without justification except vengeance. (And I have not mentioned Harry Truman deeds.) But this is just evidence of what the government is capable of where there are no consequences.
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More relevantly, there is the objection that an inquiry into the Bush Administration actions will split the country and cause unrest. My answer is simple. Americans need to know what went on if they are going to control their government in the future. If people argue about what the government has done and whether it was justified, then that is all to the good. It will take the place of discussions about Michelle Obama’s dresses, the first-dog, etc.
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Finally, if we expose what was done and it is bad, then that exposure will give “ammunition†to our enemies. First, the enemies almost certainly know more than the American people. (Perhaps they read the Washington Post or New York Times.) Second, we have bigger fish to fry: the integrity of our system of government. We can survive terrorist acts but we cannot survive the collapse of the rule of law. Third, we would not be simply exposing what when on but punishing it when appropriate. This is loyalty to great ideals. The world will notice.
Media Elite Fall Down Again, and Again and …
For all of their gasbaggery about the virtue and necessity of the Fourth Estate, the glittering mainstream media elite (big names, big money, very little gumshoe) is simply allergic to breaking news, and intelligently reporting about anything that implicates the power structure beyond the isolated criminal doings of one man or woman, i.e, senators and congressmen who terrorize airport bathrooms and congressional pages, or cheesy Midwest governors with small mind/big hair complexes. Those stories are safe, and therefore deserve the exhaustion of every pitiful analysis and resource.
But when it comes to serious stuff — preemptive war, torture, spying on Americans without warrant, the upending of the U.S constitution — these mainstream mavens (who are ever-so-fond of waxing nostalgic about their weaning during the Woodward & Bernstein glory years of the 70’s) quickly “close ranks” and reframe the context of these stories to ensure the teeniest impact possible on the status quo. This typically means protecting their establishment friends in government, not rattling the corporate sponsors, and skittering off to perceivably more ratings-grabbing news, like what really happened to Anna Nicole Smith, and what are the ladies on The View dishing about today? This is all done of course, in that gratingly condescending way (think and picture Chris Matthews) that has all the subtle effect of nails filing down on a chalkboard.
The worst is when they completely ignore stories that put their “profession” in the most garish of lights, those little slivers of truth that peek out from time to time thanks to real reporters in the business. David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize this week for his expose on the media using generals planted by the Pentagon to sell the war , but I bet most Americans haven’t heard of “message force multipliers” and wouldn’t know why they should care, since the story never made it to the nightly news.
As for the current torture scandal, of which we have hardly heard the full extent, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent analysis on his site today regarding the corporate media’s complicity in playing down the story throughout the Bush years and its ongoing attempts to frame it in the most self-serving way possible. A taste:
For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees (look at this extremely detailed exposé by The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from December, 2002 to get a sense for how much we’ve known about all of this and for how long we’ve known it).  Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it.  Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses — things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.
Read more here.